"James E. Gunn - The Burning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

thought the administration building was untouched. But that was illusion; it was a shell of blank windows
reddened by a dying glow.

It was summer, and the night was hot. The fiery death of what had been one of the MidwestтАЩs loveliest
and finest universities made it hotter. But he was cold inside as he watched the labor and devotion of a
hundred years burning, burningтАж.

A man ran toward the waiting crowd, a torch flaring in his hand, his face dark and unreadable, yelling,
тАЬCome on! TheyтАЩre running the eggheads now!тАЭ

For a moment longer the crowd waited and then, silently, it surged forward. For a few hundred yards he
was carried with it, unable to fight free. At the brink of the hill, it dropped him. He stood there, unmoving,
jostled by people who pushed past, not feeling them.

Beyond the hill were the physical science building, the experimental biology building, the building for
business and economics. They were more isolated, more secure than those on top of the hill. Or so it
may have seemed.

Now they, too, were burning. They were fire resistant and they burned less readily, but they burned. The
flames roared in the night, and between the flames the forked, black figures ran back and forth. At every
exit, the silent crowd waited for them with clubs and pitchforks and axes. Some of the black figures
turned back into the flames.

The flames behind him and the flames in front, he watched, and all he could think about was that his
papers were gone, charred and irretrievable, and the intolerable waste of five long years of labor and
research. Even the Tool was gone.

Then, like a wave of nausea, the truth hit him. The black figures down there were people, people he
knew and liked and respected, professors and their wives and their children. He turned aside and was
sick.

As he straightened, he fought the impulse to run down the hill, to scream at the mob: тАЬStop it, stop it, stop
it! These are people like you. They live, they work, they love, they obey the laws! TheyтАЩre the best you
have and youтАЩre killing it, and youтАЩre killing your country! Stop before itтАЩs too late!

But it was already too late. It was futile. If he tried to help those black figures running below, he would
only die himself. He wasnтАЩt important, but what he knew and the promise that knowledge held тАФ that
was important.

Too many good men had died there already.

He closed his eyes and thought of Sylvia Robbins, who was intelligent, beautiful, as good a friend as any
man ever had and might have been more in time, and who now was dying there. He thought of Dr.
William Nugent, that tall, lean, iron-gray man of quick intuitions and relentless determination in his search
for the truth. He thought of Dr. Aaron Friedman and Professor Samuel Black and a dozen othersтАж.

And he thought:If you are down there in that hell, my friends, forgive me .Forgive me, all of you,
for being logical while you are dyingтАж.

And forgive them, the logicless, murderous mob.